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Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Kill The Rats

Welcome to the ninth instalment of the EVE Blog Banter , the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here . Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

Last month Ga'len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith "WebMandrill" Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: "Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?"

* * * * *

Belt rats.

Yep, I think that NPC pirates sitting around in belts with nothing to do except shoot some pod pilot that happens to warp in is insanity. What are they doing there? What do they do to keep occupied the other 12 hours no one is in system? Why do they bring the least amount of firepower when obviously out-gunned and why do they not run away?

The current implementation is obviously a mechanic for making money and nothing else. Its so 2003 and needs to be updated. As usual, I have ideas. Here is my seven step plan to improving the system.

1. Remove the current implementation of belt rats entirely.

2. Add rat mining operations. Randomly spawn pirate fleets that include mining ships, haulers, and sentries. These spawns should be limited in number per constellation such that you find one in every ten to fifteen asteroids belts you check out. When a mining operation is wiped out, it respawns somewhere else in the constellation. Also, the mining ships and haulers should begin to warp soon after your ship(s) arrive in the belt. The size of the mining operation would depend on the security rating of the system, and the number and size of the guarding rats should be at least double what you run into in a belt today, if not more.

3. Add rat spawns that will come into a belt after you are there after a random number of minutes, range from 1 to 100 minutes. That means if you stay in a belt for a while eventually the rats will scan you down and attack you, but you can't farm rats in belt after belt after belt. It means mining operations will be consistently attacked but belt ratters will be frustrated and this is a more realistic scenario. These spawns should scale their size to the number of player ships that are in belt, i.e. a fleet of three ships sitting in the belt should be attacked by more rats than if it were one ship.

4. Rats should run away if its going badly or if more players warp in.

5. Rats should practice target switching like Sleepers do.

6. More complexes found using the on board scanner should be added to make up for the removal of current belt rats. The idea is not to nerf the typicall ratter's overall income but to make it less of a mind numbing and immersion breaking exercise.

7. With all this in place, introduce rats with drones, rats using cloaking devices to set traps, and rats using more exotic ship types (like Heavy Interdictors!) and, one more thing.... brace yourself... Capital rats. That's right. I want a Blood Raider carrier to show up on my overview and me have to call in my corp mates to take it down before it or its escorts kill me.

The end result of this mechanic overhaul would be a more realistic form of interaction with rats. I think Sleepers were done right: they guard installations and mostly ignore belts, and they send in bigger waves as their numbers are diminished by the players. I want the known space rats to act in a similar fashion so that they more properly emulate players. This would make ratting more engaging and varied.

13 comments:

I've often said that an awesome use of rats would be a roaming gang full of 'em complete with bubblers, tacklers, ECM and DPS. Of course these would have to be scaled from 1.0 space to 0.0, but it would make space travel interesting to say the least.

I love the mining rat operation idea. Also the roaming gang proposed by Cozmik R5. Plus it would make so much more sense, as in common sense and lore worthiness. I can definitely envision CCP doing something about rat belts in the future.

I actually fully and entirely agree with this. It would completely change the mentality people have towards "ratting" and certainly in my opinion make it MUCH more entertaining...as well as adding realism to the game which CCP seems to strive for. Only thing I feel a little iffy about it the Capital rats. As long as they're rare like officer spawns are (or even more so) and only found in 0.1 or 0.0 systems than yeah, I'm totally 100% on-board with this idea.

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